One cause of information leaks is a situation where printed matter that has been printed inside a company is taken outside the company. As a countermeasure for such information leaks, methods and systems have been proposed in which printed content is accumulated, and information tracking (knowing who printed what) can be performed. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-178939 discloses a method in which a printer driver side is provided with a configuration for generating a print log and transmitting the print log to a print log storage server and a configuration for performing setting regarding the generation of print logs, and in which it is possible to perform management and detailed setting regarding print logs on the client side.
When print content is accumulated (that is, saved as electronic data), consideration needs to be given to whether there are constraints on the save processing itself. In general, processing for outputting certain content as printed matter and processing for saving electronic data in an easily reusable form in a storage apparatus such as a hard disk are often considered to be duplication processing, regardless of the type of processing.
Also, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-302654 proposes a method to restrict the number of times printing can be performed according to a preset value. In the case where printed content is saved as image data, and then the same content is to be printed, if the previously saved image is searched for through an image search and found as a result, such processing is considered to be duplication. Copying is controlled according to the number of times that such duplication is permitted.
Consider the case where in a system in which printed documents are saved and accumulated, a document contains content for which the number of times that duplication can be performed or the like is restricted. In this case, it is possible for the number of times that duplication is performed to unintendedly exceed the restriction due to the sum of the number of times that printing was performed and the number of times that document data for printing was saved. In order to prevent this, a method is conceivable in which when document data targeted for duplication processing is to be saved, content for which duplication processing is restricted is removed when saving the document data.
However, in such a case, the restricted content is not included in the saved document data, and therefore the efficiency in searching decreases when performing an image search on accumulated document data in order to make a determination regarding duplication such as in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-302654.